Ah Halloween, the crisp crinkle of fallen leaves underfoot, the drinks shared with friends, the indulgence in our favorite sweets, the culturally acceptable slut-shaming.

I’m not a women’s studies major. I haven’t even been to a women’s studies class (unless you count me living my life). I have not read or watched The Scarlet Letter. But I have seen every episode of “How I Met Your Mother,” “Mean Girls” and “Easy A” easily a dozen times. These movies and shows are an ingrained part of our popular culture, and slut shaming is prevalent in all of them.

There are two harmful falsehoods perpetuated when we as a society call a person, or what a person is wearing, slutty: firstly, that a woman’s dress reveals something about her sexuality; and secondly, that she should be shamed for exhibiting that sexuality.

I like the “Slutty Pumpkin” episode of “How I Met Your Mother.” I love the show in general. It’s funny, frustrating and heartwarming, and it’s easy to brush aside the misogynist character Barney and his antics as a joke. It’s also easy to ignore the fact that the show thinks it’s acceptable to slut shame.

Sure, the other characters reprimand Barney for calling girls sluts simply because they’re showing some cleavage, but then they continue to reference girls in slutty costumes for the duration of the episode. The writers also named the episode “The Slutty Pumpkin” and then named the follow-up episode “The Slutty Pumpkin Returns.” That female character is labeled as slutty because of the strategic cut outs on her pumpkin costume. Words are powerful, and the association between a short skirt and a “slut” is broadcasted on a mass scale.

In “Mean Girls,” it’s the sexually-active Regina George who wears lingerie as a Halloween costume. The main character Cady wears a modest – if scary – wedding dress for Halloween, and then calls Regina a slut. Yes, “Mean Girls” is supposed to be a reflection of girl culture, but I think it sometimes perpetuates the harmful behavior it was trying to call out.

It’s easy to laugh your butt off while watching “Easy A” and completely miss the fact that it’s calling society out on slut shaming. If a stigma is so bad it could make someone as cool and confident as Emma Stone snap, it might be harmful enough to warrant our attention. In that movie, one of Stone’s character’s responses to slut shaming is to change her everyday outfits into lingerie-inspired corsets. This is because revealing more skin and wearing bedroom-related clothing is what sluts do, according to society.

Intentional and unintentional examples of shaming girls for their sexuality are rampant in pop culture, but that doesn’t mean it happens to individuals in real life, right? Those are over dramatized situational comedies that have nothing to do with us.

In the Aug. 2015 article “Sneers and Leers: Romance Writers and Gendered Sexual Stigma” by Jennifer Lois and Joanna Gregson, they found that women who publicly recognize some aspect of their sexuality, specifically by being romance writers, are often shamed through either sneering or leering.

Sneering, as defined in the article, is when people flat-out say romance writers are writing slutty, smutty, trashy and inappropriate material. Leering was defined as when a person seemed to “approve” of a romance writers profession, but then took that as permission to pry into the personal sex life of the writer. Because a woman acknowledging her sexuality, even through a fictional character in a fictional universe, must mean that she is a slut open for business.

I think the definition of stigma would help promote some understanding and thoughtfulness in this case. Stigma is the shame that is felt around a certain label placed on a person, the shame that society thinks should be felt by a person with a certain label or status. Lois and Gragson said stigma is a tool that society uses to control people’s behavior. When an individual steps outside the bounds of what society thinks is acceptable, they make them feel shameful.

In the 2006 documentary “This Film is Not Yet Rated,” the Motion Picture Association of America is scrutinized for their method of rating films. One pattern noted in their ratings is that a film depicting a male orgasm on screen receives a PG-13 rating, whereas depicting a female orgasm on screen earns a movie an R rating. That board is made up of everyday members of society, and they view female sexuality as particularly inappropriate.

I personally have witnessed women shamed for what they’re wearing because of perceived vulgarity. It’s whispered between people at bars. It’s yelled from cars at sorority houses (entire houses of people deemed shamefully sexual, simply because of perception, how does that make sense?). It’s cat called across streets.

Speaking from personal experience, girls are just as bad if not worse than men about it. Slut-shaming is highly accepted in our society, and I don’t think people understand what they’re doing, where it comes from or how damaging it is.

People associate scant dress with immoral promiscuity, and then shame both a girls style of dress and her sexuality. It seems like people are OK with shaming women just for showing some skin, for showing that they have a woman’s body. It seems like we’re OK with shaming women just for being women. So this Halloween, dress how you want to and think before you say the word, “slut.”

Addy Forte is a senior apparel design and merchandising major from Seattle. She can be contacted at 335-1140 or by [email protected]. The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of the staff of The Daily Evergreen or those of the Office of Student Media.